Bioinformatician Pedro Beltrao has posted what is probably the most thought-provoking article I’ve read all year.
His basic tenet is that the the current mechanisms by which scientific research is produced have become counter-productive. Rather than just whingeing about it he proposes an alternative mechanism.
During my ill-fated career as a PhD student the constant feeling of being in competition with everyone else was something I hated. That was probably partly due to my state-of-mind at the time but I always got the impression that talking to other scientists was a bad thing.
In my current job I deal with researchers in several different fields. Many of them are doing really cool research that I would love to talk about but I don’t.
Pedro’s suggestion may turn out to be unworkable but I applaud the sentiment.
Thank you for the support :). I hope that such model would facilitate collaboration and speed of discovery for the individual scientist. If this is the case it should serve as incentive to break the energy barrier of setting a blog up to talk about current research. I guess we will see in a year or two.